I have an Alpha 200 that I'm trying to install Gentoo on. I've been running this machine successfully for some time wth Red Hat 7.2. This machine does not have a CDR that it can boot from, though once the OS is booted, it seems to read from the CD just fine. I thought I could boot with my Red Hat floppies and then install from there, and this seemed to be working until I started getting shared library errors while emerging. A further complication is that the Red Hat mount (at least as I boot from floppies into rescue mode) doesn't have the ability to bind mount.

Is there any way that I can make a Gentoo boot floppy, or does anyone have any other ideas as to how I could bootstrap this machine?

Im not sure if this thread is still current enough for you to be interested but anyway...

I have just completed an install on an Alpha 200 4/166.
I too had trouble with the old scsi cdrom that came with it. I decided to temporarily install another hard-drive with redhat 7.2 on it and to boot from that but then I discovered that the cdrom could handle the current 'release' live cd (rather than the experimental one) provided it was burnt at the slowest speed (4x in my case). Dont ask me why this might be the case but i hope it helps.

I have an Alpha 200 that I'm trying to install Gentoo on. I've been running this machine successfully for some time wth Red Hat 7.2. This machine does not have a CDR that it can boot from, though once the OS is booted, it seems to read from the CD just fine. I thought I could boot with my Red Hat floppies and then install from there, and this seemed to be working until I started getting shared library errors while emerging. A further complication is that the Red Hat mount (at least as I boot from floppies into rescue mode) doesn't have the ability to bind mount.

Is there any way that I can make a Gentoo boot floppy, or does anyone have any other ideas as to how I could bootstrap this machine?

Thanks,
Tad

Have you tried the alternative installation methods howto? (from an existing Linux installation). I had quite good results installing Gentoo from slackware boot floppies on an old 486, and from Debian boot floppies on PPC. I'm not sure how easy it is to find boot floppies for other distros on alpha, but maybe that will help.

I'm not sure why the bind mount would make that much difference, but I've been wrong before. I've done it both ways with several different architectures and never seen a difference at all System always boots up just fine. Make the /dev/shm directory and everything should work just fine.

Hmm. I just looked at the date... you've probably solved this already...